How Don Played the Deal in Colorado

In response, he went nuclear-winter claiming the game was rigged against him and Cruz was stealing delegates. Initial response was that he was simply whining after getting beat, much like he did after Cruz beat him in Iowa. Then the speculation went to Trump being incompetent by midweek. Over the week, Trump’s caterwauling and threatening continued to intensify.

By week’s end, another view presented itself. This one is also sourced in his book “The Art of the Deal,” as sometimes the best deal is the one you don’t make. There is a significant school of thought that thinks Trump knew precisely what the rules in Colorado and Wyoming were. He also knew that he was going to lose in both states so he did not campaign in either state, opting to go nuclear-winter and blow up the entire process if he can’t win.

I don’t know about you, but if I were a delegate being physically threatened and called all manner of names by a candidate and his surrogates, it would be a cold day in a very hot place before I lift a finger to help him become president. Trump is running a campaign unlike anything seen in decades. The problem is that Cruz is running a better campaign at the grassroots level, a campaign that will be necessary to win against Obama’s Big Data turn out the vote database. See American Thinker

The Mic Is Out Trick

Last Thursday night all three remaining Republican presidential candidates gave campaign speeches at the annual Al Smith Dinner in NYC. Trump and Kasich were up first and everything went normally. Cruz was up last.

His mike was cut shortly after his speech began. Limbaugh was one of the few that caught the dirty trick played on Cruz. It was a well-planned trick, as dinner was served between the Kasich and Cruz speech. Cruz audio went silent and someone turned up the microphone feed from the crowd who were now eating.

The media instantly went into their “crowd ignores Cruz during speech” mode. Even Sean Hannity played along, pretending there were audio difficulties and went to talk about something else.

Very well planned and executed trick by Trump’s union and media buddies. See Rush Limbaugh

Aggies Have Sense

The Texas A&M University system embraced campus carry – concealed and not concealed – writing rules that allow students, faculty, and employees to carry and keep firearms in most of the university system. This is in great contrast with the girls at Texas University at Austin, who are fighting the same state law with everything they have. Nice to see some common sense in the university system these days. What better place than at A&M? See Breitbart

Landing them Ships Is Final Frontier

SpaceX landed the first stage of its Falcon 9 on its unmanned drone ship / barge some 300 km downrange from Cape Canaveral recently on April 8. This was the first successful landing at sea.

There were several previous attempts that for one reason or another failed. The first attempt ran out of hydraulic fluid above the ship and failed. The second exploded some 150 seconds into flight. A third touched down on the barge but one of the legs folded due to icing and the booster fell over and exploded. The final failure was heavy weight flight that did not have sufficient fuel available for the landing profile. It came in fast and landed hard, fell over and exploded.

January 2016 the first successful landing took place as the first stage successfully returned to the Cape for a controlled landing on ground. The April 8th flight was the first successful landing at sea.

Elon Musk is trying to turn the booster to a future flight. Short successful steps interspersed by crashes that produce large quantities of aerospace grade aluminum paperweights. Good show. Very good show. See The Verge

Alex Gimarc lives in Anchorage since retiring from the military in 1997. His interests include science and technology, environment, energy, economics, military affairs, fishing and disabilities policies. His weekly column “Interesting Items” is a summary of news stories with substantive Alaska-themed topics. He is a small business owner and Information Technology professional.